Buffon rejects the offer from Arabia and considers retiring from football

After 28 years as a professional there isn’t a minute more and for Gigi Buffon it becomes evident on a summer evening when faced with an absurd offer from a championship that doesn’t exist yet, but already pays well, only it’s too far away and problematic and alien and ends up laying bare a reaction so simple as to be almost unpronounceable: enough.

Buffon hasn’t said it yet, for him it’s a shocking decision, but finding himself determined to refuse the 30 million a year offered by Saudi Arabia is a bit like confessing that it’s time to stop. It would be a lot of money, at the age of 45, a lot, but it would also be another world, a long journey, a challenge that would, at the very least, need other prerequisites and which is not even the ideal career ending for someone who has never been ready to change. Buffon chose Parma, where he started, to say goodbye: the perfect circularity of an immense career was an excellent excuse for hedging and then, as you know, the goalkeeper, he even said, is a romantic, someone who does not have a sense of limits he wants to have it. Someone who has been the owner since he was 17 and grew up inside a goal then, outside, he feels lost. In order not to deal with injuries and ailments, he has built mobile goals, to always be moved a little further, beyond the age of reasonable football retirement. The last goal to hang the end credits on, the promotion with Parma who launched it in 1995 and that hasn’t arrived yet, yet there is the possibility that the final word will arrive without the announced goal. Arabia is probably just the litmus test, the idea that becomes concrete in front of a proposal that seemed to Buffon what it is: indecent. He already felt out of sync and away from his family, moving to the Middle East would mean starting over when you know it’s all over and there’s not even the temptation of another round of the carousel because the Arab Premier is a heap of business , it’s sports politics, round-the-ball diplomacy, not exactly hoot. To say, the USA of Messi on the field and Beckham as manager, Chiellini’s farewell championship, Del Piero’s adopted homeland could even offer unprecedented stimuli, old friends to hang out with, but no, there are the Saudis of petrodollars and the story gets very serious. Too much for someone who, at forty-five, still wants to play. Or at least he had it before realizing that if the time for great choices has passed, it is definitely over.

He will think about it, perhaps more so as to understand exactly what is better to say, where it is better to be moved and tell about a day that did not seem even remotely visible to him and that simply presented itself. Not exactly cheating. Buffon has already made many considerations about next season, he has been thinking for a long time about a managerial role, about a metamorphosis that leaves him in the environment where he has always been, about the right proposal that is not yet on the table and maybe he cannot get there until that he is seen between the posts. That role carried for an existence suddenly becomes too tight for him, he is no longer comfortable with it. If a new, very rich experience frightens instead of intriguing, it is not only for the destination, it is precisely the route that gives way and loses its meaning. Buffon has come out of the group of those who can be bought, he takes back his sticker and takes it home to give it back the inestimable value granted to all those who have made a difference. It happened a few championships ago, the sticker left the field before him who stayed to have fun and now, suddenly, he knows he has other things to think about.